Adaptation, May 20 - 21, 2010

In an effort to promote scholarly discourse in all disciplines and fields, the Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference at the University of Washington, Seattle invites graduate students to submit papers addressing notions of adaptation, a concept Dudley Andrew calls, "potentially as far reaching as you like" (Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory, 1984). The appearance of two journals dedicated to adaptation studies in the past two years along with the proliferation of theoretical texts on the subject testify to the ever-increasing reach of the topic.

We thus invite papers that take seriously Thomas Leicht's pronouncement that the future of adaptation studies depends on leading it away from its dependence on the "book-into-film" model. While not excluding papers that address the literary as an original source, this conference encourages approaches that move away from concerns of fidelity toward broader and more inclusive discourses. How might allowing for a broader range of original source texts suggest innovative shifts in adaptation? Or, how do non-literary source texts enlarge the range of adaptation?

We also invite papers that explore the farthest reaches of "adaption studies," as the turn to the digital continues to challenge both the medial and disciplinary specificity of "adaptation." Do these shifts mean we need to rethink notions of adaptation? What does it mean to adapt to new technologies? And how might these changes influence disciplines beyond the humanities and social sciences? Do new technologies affect categories of the natural in the sciences? Or does it mean that the cyborgs of science fiction are the new domain of the history of science? And how might these technologies translate into issues of scale and creativity in our built environment, where the program and not the architect, or so it has been argued, is itself the source of creativity?